ABSTRACT
When Ann Phoenix (Phoenix et al. 1991) was investigating the lives of teenage mothers, she realised that, despite all her efforts to work sensitively with these very young women, there were times when their participation in the research was lost through difficulties she had not been in a position to predict. In one case, interviewing a young mother living in her parent’s council flat, where the walls were so thin it was possible for the parents to hear their discussion, Ann Phoenix was aware that she could have caused pain to the whole family because she asked if the interviewee would really like to have her own home.
